Facebook and the low-hanging fruit

BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- There is a continued effort afoot to get people to quit Facebook over privacy concerns.

If you didn't know it, May 31 was actually dubbed "Quit Facebook Day" and over 30,000 people quit using Facebook and cancelled their accounts.

The user base for Facebook is estimated by some to be over a half billion users. I don't think too many of them knew about Quit Facebook Day.

If anything manages to kill Facebook, it will not be privacy concerns. It will be scams on its naïve users.

Right now nobody is quitting Facebook. And if they do quit they will probably be back.

digits: Facebook's Zuckerberg in the hot seat

(8:34)

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in the hot seat at the D8 Conference, and faced questions about privacy concerns and personalization on the Web. Simon Constable and Julia Angwin discuss with WSJ's Jessica Vascellaro. Plus: WSJ's Geoffrey Fowler joins the show to explain how digital self-publishing is like YouTube for the publishing industry.

I, for one, decided never to join Facebook in the first place. It seemed like a slicker MySpace targeted at people who cannot figure out how to get an online presence any other way. But I should use it anyway. (MySpace and MarketWatch are both divisions of News Corp.
NWS, +2.05%
)

(You should note that there is a John C. Dvorak Facebook page, but it was done by someone posing as me.)

Because of the huge number of people using Facebook, it has actually become a viable sub-platform where people can take care of much, if not all, of their online business. They can message people, do email, status updates and keep tabs on their friends and events.

MySpace has a similar sub-platform status, at least for a while.

The dark side of all this is that most Facebook users have settled comfortably in with this platform, and have become targets for cybercriminals. Sitting ducks, as it were.

The fact is that a classic Facebook user has no long-term online experience.

Computerworld and other sources are now reporting that over the past two weekends, various scams aimed at the hapless Facebook users have emerged and now it is believed that Facebook and its users will be the number one fraud target in the months ahead.

The initial salvo comes from what are known as rogue apps that run on Facebook and infect the user's computer with various levels of malware. The tamest of these are pop-up ads that inundate the user with offers and deals.

In the worst case scenario the user clicks on something and ends up getting a Trojan Horse downloaded on to the machine. A Trojan Horse infection allows outsiders to take over your computer at will to use it for nefarious purposes such as sending spam to others.

Your machine could also become a storage center for pornography, a proxy machine for criminal activity or any number of things you do not want.

Facebook users have become the low-hanging fruit for this sort of effort. Few even know about Trojan Horses, malware, ad-ware, any of it. They do not read computer magazines and few actually explore the information on the web to any extent. So they have no real way to find out about the problem.

Worse they are susceptible, like all naïve users, to fake alerts and online notifications which are scams unto themselves.

None of this bodes well for the future of a company that probably should be public already. The potential for a remarkable initial public offering for Facebook is limitless.

In fact, the company should have already gone public and the financiers of the operation have to wonder why it has not happened.

In the meantime, as the worldwide scamming network of schemers, phishers and fraudsters gravitate towards Facebook and its users, the operation is now at risk.

What makes it worse is that Facebook commercial orientation has always been based upon the idea that users like to share information about what they do and what they like in hopes that advertising revenue can be obtained by exploiting this milieu of frankness. "John C. Dvorak wants you to know that he loves Coke Zero. Go here for a free coupon. He did!"

What if I never said any such thing and what if the coupon is a link to malware? You click on it and you and your machine are compromised.

This is no laughing matter and such hacks may become the downfall of the service and the downfall of many advanced concepts developed to exploit social networking.

Meanwhile, a killer IPO is going by the wayside as time is running out. Tick tock.

Intraday Data provided by SIX Financial Information and subject to terms of use.
Historical and current end-of-day data provided by SIX Financial Information. Intraday data
delayed per exchange requirements. S&P/Dow Jones Indices (SM) from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
All quotes are in local exchange time. Real time last sale data provided by NASDAQ. More
information on NASDAQ traded symbols and their current financial status. Intraday
data delayed 15 minutes for Nasdaq, and 20 minutes for other exchanges. S&P/Dow Jones Indices (SM)
from Dow Jones & Company, Inc. SEHK intraday data is provided by SIX Financial Information and is
at least 60-minutes delayed. All quotes are in local exchange time.